ABSTRACT: The aim of this study was to investigate the temporal
cortical activation patterns underlying different stages of humor comprehension (e.g., detection of
incongruity stage, resolution of incongruity stage, and affective stage).
Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured when 16 subjects were
apprehending cartoon pictures including humorous, non-humorous and unrelated items.
Results showed that both humorous and unrelated items elicited a more negative
ERP deflection (N500-800) than non-humorous ones between 500 - 800 ms, which might
reflect detection to incongruent element during humor apprehension. Then, both humorous
and non-humorous items elicited a more positive ERP deflection (P800-1000) than
unrelated ones between 800 - 1000 ms, which might reflect a classification process
preliminarily evaluating whether there were attainable cues in the pictures
used to form possible association between context and picture (we named it “association
evaluation” stage). Furthermore, humorous items elicited a more
positive slow wave than non-humorous items which also elicited a more positive
wave than unrelated items between 1000 - 1600 ms, during which this component might be involved
in the forming of novel associations (resolution of incongruity). Lastly,
between 1600 - 2000 ms, humorous
items elicited a more positive ERP deflection (P1600-2000) than both non-humorous
and unrelated items, which might be related to emotion processing during humor
apprehension. Based on these results, we deeply subdivided the second stage (resolution
of incongruity) into two stages: association evaluation and incongruity
resolution.